Keats, Burns, and the Dispensing Power of Genius

Keats’s literary career did not last five years, and the least productive of all those years was surely 1818. Keats’s decision in the summer of 1818 to accompany his friend Charles Brown on a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland, leaving his dying brother alone in London, served to focus his sense that his duty to his art might conflict with his other obligations. His visit to Burns’s cottage in particular confirmed Keats in his conviction that the poet cannot claim exemption from the moral obligations that bind the rest of us. The thought generated in Keats a ‘hateful siege of contraries’, but it was in undergoing that siege that he first discovered his mature poetic voice.